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Wednesday, June 07, 2000
By Jonathan D. Silver, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
On any given day, Hillary Rodham Clinton wields the clout to hog headlines, Janet Reno sets policy and Oprah Winfrey governs our reading habits.
Now that's power.
But that's also only half the story.
Despite the fact that women today enjoy an unprecedented level of influence and decision-making in the United States, a closer look reveals merely slow and steady gains since women gathered five years ago in Beijing to assess their global status.
Women's groups laud President Clinton for doing more than any other chief executive in history to pack his cabinet with female appointees. That initiative, though, hasn't permeated Congress, the judiciary, state governments or corporate America.
"There's a general perception that we've made a lot more progress than we have," said Mary Hawkesworth, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
In advance of this week's United Nations conference on the status of women, US Women Connect, an umbrella organization, graded the country's efforts to promote women to roles of power and decision-making as a "B."
But Hawkesworth and other experts don't paint such a rosy picture.
Ellie Wymard, an English professor at Carlow College and author of "Conversations With Uncommon Women," denounced Pittsburgh for promulgating an old boys' network and criticized political parties for not doing enough to field female political candidates.
"I think that women in Pittsburgh are sort of treading water," Wymard said. "I think the political parties in Pittsburgh don't get behind women, and I think that, in general, Pittsburghers still have a very conservative or stereotypical notion of the proper place of women."
Even US Women Connect acknowledged in its report card that women sparsely populate the legislative branch of government.
There are 58 women in the U.S. House of Representatives and nine in the U.S. Senate out of a total of 535 elected positions. That's 13 percent. Forty-two other countries boast a higher percentage, according to Hawkesworth.
"How is 13 percent a B? I mean, when 50 percent would be an A -- perfect equality -- 13 percent should definitely be somewhere between a C and a D," said economist Heidi Hartmann, director of the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
Among federal court judges, women fare slightly better, making up 14 percent of the appointed slots. There are only three women governors (Arizona, New Hampshire and New Jersey). And the track record for elected officials and appointees at the state level is fairly dismal.
Pennsylvania ranks 45th in a survey of women in elective office conducted by Hawkesworth's center. In 1999, there were 32 female legislators out of 253, or 13 percent. The national average is 23 percent.
The state of Washington was at the top, with 41 percent, and Alabama brought up the rear, with 8 percent.
As for appointees to top positions in state government, Pennsylvania ranked 23rd in 1999, holding steady from the year before and moving up by 10 places from 1997, according to a study by the Center for Women in Government at the State University of New York, Albany.
Closer to home, Allegheny County got low marks from Bernadette Comfort, administrative director of Chatham College's Center for Women in Politics in Pennsylvania. She pointed to the fact that of the 15 members of the inaugural County Council, only two are women.
"Ugh," Comfort said.
Mayor Murphy was lauded by top women appointees. Although women do not serve in the Murphy administration's most powerful positions -- deputy mayor, executive secretary, and head of the Urban Redevelopment Authority -- they hold several key titles, including solicitor and the directorships of planning, budget and personnel.
"That's something that Mayor Murphy was committed to from day one. He wanted to make sure his administration was very diverse, and he took advantage of the talented women who were around," said outgoing planning director Eloise Hirsh.
In corporate America, the private sector's progress has mirrored the public sector's -- slow but steady.
Last year, 12 percent of the Fortune 500's corporate officers were women, up from 9 percent in 1995, according to Catalyst, a New York City nonprofit advocacy group for women in business.
Women held 3 percent of the top-earner spots compared with 1.2 percent four years earlier. And 5 percent of the top companies' high-profile executive positions were held by women, up from 2.4 percent in 1995.
"At the very senior levels, you're talking about very minute increases, and the problem is, we need to increase the roles for women below those corporate officer levels in order to get them into those positions," said Marcia Brumit Kropf, vice president of research and information at Catalyst.
Any advance is good. But recent research re-emphasized how much farther there is to go.
This year, for the first time, Catalyst studied the placement of women in the Fortune 501-to-1000.
"We found that women only hold 8.5 percent of board seats in those companies. That's almost the same number we found in the first 500 when we started counting in 1993," Kropf said.
Whatever good feeling and can-do spirit was generated in Beijing has mostly evaporated in the United States, experts said. Yes, the conference raised humanity's collective consciousness and made women's issues highly visible.
"But, certainly you can't point to any huge, sudden bolt of lightning that changed everything for women as a result of Beijing," Hartmann said.
Not so in other countries. In France, Beijing gave women the impetus to push for a constitutional amendment that forces political parties to nominate women for half the slates or risk losing government campaign funding, Hawkesworth said.
"In the aftermath of Beijing, the French took this issue of gender balance in government seriously and did something about it, and in this country the issue has been ignored," Hawkesworth said.
Why has progress been so laggardly? The answer, at its most basic and simple level, is three letters long: Men. Men still control the vast majority of power in this country, controlling votes on legislation and holding sway over public policy decisions.
"In order to do anything, you've got to persuade the men to do it. They hold the majority of votes," Hawkesworth said.
In the private sector, where the old boys' network is still alive and well, experts believe wholesale cultural change is needed before women can be widely represented in positions of power.
"The work environment that exists in most corporations was designed in the '50s and had a lot of presumptions associated with it," Kropf said.
"People rely still on old habits and old ways of thinking."
Women and Power